Kenzo / Resort 2013

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In 1970, the Japanese designer Kenzo Takada started his label in Paris, calling it “Jungle Jap” (a name, incidentally, which engendered some consternation and controversy back in the day). Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, Kenzo’s creative directors for over a year now, revisited those early days with their resort by going (literally) to the jungle—specifically, near Phuket, in southern Thailand, trekking for four days. Takada himself had done his own odyssey through the region decades earlier, traversing through Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines on his way to Europe, so that by the time he was working in France, his clothes blended post-1968 Parisian street style with distinctly Asiatic silhouettes and layering. As for Lim and Leon, their working vacation was time well spent because it exposed them firsthand to the ceremonial clothes they saw being worn on weekends and the everyday garb of people living in the villages along the routes they took, which directly informed the look of the collection. In a bigger way, their travels reflect how Kenzo saw being in a world where globalism was something that was emotional and experiential, as opposed to something you explore via clicking onto Internet Explorer.

Maybe that’s why their bigness of vision makes them so well suited to Kenzo. That, and the fact that they make clothes that look like you’re meant to have fun in them, another founding tenet of the house. There was no lack of fun, spirit, or adventurous outlook here. Lim and Leon offered a look that was pumped up: repeating the KENZO logo spelled out in silhouettes of tigers on T-shirt dresses; injecting volume into tightly belted, zippered utility jackets worn over wide shorts or pants with legs that detach; stretching colorful sweaters so they hang low over slouchy trousers; and wittily nodding to the idea of tiger stripes by insetting them as graphic bands on the sleeves of jackets. Their resort also mixed the athletic (light cottons that felt as if they were techno fabrics, they were so papery) the artisanal (raffia weaving), and the delightfully kitsch (zebra. . . on leopard prints). Lim and Leon also conjured up a snazzy new bag, the No. 18—a multi-pouch purse in various fabulous/sick color and leather combinations—that opens to reveal. . . an iPad pocket.